


Works like magic

by Ruuuka



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 14:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20950166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuuka/pseuds/Ruuuka
Summary: On a planet regularly assaulted by alien hordes, the weirdest creatures can cross your path. Thus, little Morgan doesn't get unnerved when she's suddenly forced to adopt one.





	Works like magic

The goat-creature-man-thing was spending its fifth day in the lamp-lit underground cell. Morgan Stark, 9, had a suspicion that it was starving by now. Mom was nowhere in sight to take over the case, and Happy or anyone else was not to be informed about any occurrence in the scarcely visited Avengers Tower without her supervision, under threat of beheading. Morgan had been observing the captive's activities through the surveillance cameras. The freshly trapped goat-creature-man-thing (recently named G.C.M.T.) provided her with a lengthy occupation after finishing her lousily done homework, since Mom had stopped sending life signs from her first (and last, she had yelled at the men coming for her) space mission, so no one stacked her mediocre school books with additional challenges.

Today was the day when the aforementioned suspicion arose, also the time that she set off to meet the thing in person, to see if it was sensible enough for a chatter about its vital needs. Namely the entire city's electronic library couldn't tell anything about this species. A slender, humanoid figure, mostly black and shiny, with subtle patches of red or green occasionally flaring up on the screen; and then the head with the elongated muzzle, and the horns arching back almost tightly following the head. Whether it was running around naked or not had been unclear so far.

As for the G.C.M.T.'s behaviour, it mostly varied between dry rage and lethargy. One of its few activities was sleeping - or kneeling motionlessly by the corner, facing inwards and softly hammering its horned head into the wall. It was often followed directly by a playing session: tampering on deftly forth-called mid-air keys and screens, the attractively glowing database of the Tower, with heart-wrenching enthusiasm. It might or might not have been aware how close it sometimes got to hacking the system and getting free (to no avail, of course, Stark technology was not to be taken lightly). The rage part, it had only began towards the end of Day 3: the G.C.M.T. would stand up straight, walk around in the teeny room like on a Sunday stroll, and it would kick the metallic walls mercilessly as they got in the way. The dents in the adamantium covering had been increasing since. Luckily for the creature, the invincible metal keeping it safe from this unfamiliar planet could only bend but not break. In fact, it shouldn't have bent either. Morgan wondered if the G.C.M.T. was aware of it.

To keep the secret, and with it her head, the little girl snuck out of the Stark residence when not even Happy was in (the latest alien menace often left her alone at home with the strict order not to leave under any circumstances apart from the house being blown to smithereens). Entering the scarcely used Avengers Tower was a child's play, really. Having long snatched away the required codes and being listed among the ones with free entry made the Tower's security system like a friendly giant from that book, rather than an obstacle.

And then she stood before the mechanically sealed door, which had shut down on the intruder five days ago, waiting for the owners of the place to come and retrieve the hostage at their own leisure. Only this time, no one was to come, since the widowed Pepper Stark was now in charge of the Tower and she was presently on an unplanned journey out of planet.

With an unexpected surge of nervousness, Morgan clutched the straps of her backpack. This sensation had been increasing in frequency lately, but she knew what usually helped: she exhaled long and went over the collected data. The conclusion was that even if the G.C.M.T. _was_ sensible and harmful, the Stark system had already bested it. Right now, an army of robotic weapons were lined up around the little girl without command. Before proceeding to the last step of the journey, she peeked at the screen next to the door. She could see the G.C.M.T. in its daily corner period, the most tranquil state. Her timing couldn't have been better.

The automated guns pointed towards the door as it opened hissing before the girl's tiny form. She had no idea where the thick smoke came from, but it told her right away that something was off. Still, her survival instincts were notoriously weak against her curiosity, the latter of which now rooted her feet into the ground, and she stared at the outlines of the figure, not hunched in the corner but tall, horned and daunting in the centre of the room.

As the view cleared, she had but a second to take a glance at its face, the scariest thing she had seen: first a glass-eyed animal of long and pointed face, then it suddenly shifted into a hissing grin or a snarl, teeth so sharp and eyebrows so arched that her breath got caught in her throat, and then the entire infernal figure spread out, something dreadful, like wings, spanning the room, and then the whole thing launched towards her. Weapons shot at it beside her with a choir of deafening rattles; the creature swirled out of the way of lasers, while bullets bounced back from its body spitting sparks. Morgan stared at the sight wide-eyed, and the G.C.M.T. flew right at her.

The door slid shut before her nose, and a hollow bang jerked her body in start.

After a minute passed in motionless silence, she finally willed herself to breathe and assessed the situation: wording things in her mind put her at ease. Yes, she'd been attacked, but it wasn’t a big deal. She'd escaped. The thing was still held at bay. It was a monster. It was instinctual, not sensible.

She peeked at the screen and saw that the Devil's manifestation was now stationed by the long ravaged door, a palm flat against it, forehead leaning to it. It could have been its way to eavesdrop, but Morgan just thought that maybe the creature was being sad. Maybe it just wanted to get free, possibly to find a mate or something. 

A desire like that was a vulnerable point: she contemplated using it to control the beast better. For feeding, maybe even for tasks. She could experiment to see how much it was able to learn. If it worked, in the end she could show off with the most unique pet ever, though not as cool as a pony.

By this point, the G.C.M.T. was resting at the opposite wall, knees pulled up, hands on top of them. Self defence? A declaration of peace? Morgan was not familiar with the codes of less developed species. She might have to teach this thing language as well - next time, when she brought along her old nursery school books, and a learning software. For now, the sandwich in her backpack remained for gaining favours.

With the unpacked piece of bread in both hands and the military array behind her, the door opened up once again, for her to find the figure by the wall just as seen on the cameras.

The smoke was completely gone, and the horns seemed smaller this time, she observed while taking a few careful steps forward. The hideous grin was gone, too, the glass eyes were back - maybe crystal eyes, they seemed intricately shaped from this close, playing in a thousand colours. The expression was mask-like stiff but real to a frightening extent. A face truly out of this world.

She stopped in the centre of the room, with several smart weapons hovering around her, and blinked in surprise as the G.C.M.T. waved at her shortly, with a deceptively humane hand (she counted, as part of her scientific interest, precisely five fingers). A greeting, most likely, it was quite a universal sign; so she waved back hesitantly, and then she lifted the sandwich between them for display. The G.C.M.T. got completely motionless while she raised the nourishment to her own mouth, demonstrating its use with a mock bite, and she held it out to the creature.

Astonishingly, it lifted a palm to refuse the gift in the most gracious manner, and then its index finger pointed at her before tapping its mouth.

Morgan obediently took a large bite from the bread to show it wasn't poisoned, and she held it up to its face again. The creature leaned backwards and shuddered. Then it pointed at her and then at its mouth again, then its throat, then hers.

"Oh, I can speak," Morgan announced. "Can you?"

A faint headshake was the response.

"But you understand what I'm saying?"

A nod, and then the finely scaled creature leaned forward as slowly as if it had been moving in water. Morgan just noticed that there was no trace of the flappy wing things anywhere.

The hand that rose again to communicate was clad in a thin black leathery layer.

"Are you a ninja?" Morgan inquired.

An irate headshake, and then a finger pointed at her, then all around them. Two palms raised upwards hinted at a question.

"I'm Morgan," said the girl. "We're in the Avengers Tower. You've been trapped in here because it's off-limits to strangers, or aliens. Are you lost?"

The G.C.M.T. stared at her for a few seconds, then it slowly nodded.

"That's too bad. I'm not sure I could help you find your home."

The creature pointed at itself again and nodded fervently. Then it pointed towards the door above the girl's shoulder.

"You're not allowed to leave until an adult decides so," she announced. "They have to examine you and maybe interrogate and then say you'll be escorted out of the Solar System. Then you can go free."

The hand lingered in the air held out towards the exit, while the horned head bent to the side slightly, the face unchanged.

"Nope, you can't leave till then. Till my Mom is home, to be exact."

The head bent even more in response.

"I don't know when she's coming back, but only she can tell you to leave. I'm sorry, G.C.M.T."

The creature then held its stomach dramatically, and then its head. Then the palms came together to beg. The little girl was unable to resist that, so she sighed.

"Fine. Since you don’t like sandwiches, and I don’t know what else to give you, I suppose we could take a walk together. You can show me whatever you eat and drink. But you won't be able to leave the planet without a spaceship, so you'll have to come back here with me, until the adults are ready to take care of you. Understand?"

The mechanical nods were more than convincing. She turned around with a satisfied smile to leave.

They walked out of the building through the code-locked doors side by side, the creature's long, bouncy steps urging her to hurry up.

Just outside the main entrance, Morgan stopped for some educative time.

"Now, based on the monster movies I’ve seen so far, the first thing you need to know about is traffic. There are important rules here, so you shouldn't just cross any road you- oops."

The latter comment was about the absence of the creature beside her. And its absence nearby, across the street, anywhere at all. She was a bright little girl, so it took about ten seconds for her to figure out that she'd just lost the captive for good.

"Well, I'm nine, what do you expect?" she mumbled.

Her conscience thus out of the way, she could return home. Parents were usually responsible for their children’s misbehaviour, and Mom was capable of taking way more than the blame for this one small blunder. She should have known better than to entrust her child alone with these things, she knew how clumsy Morgan was with pets; her fish had died in two weeks, all three times.

She was at home working on a school project by the time Happy arrived. That evening, something on TV intrigued the man deeply; as Morgan deciphered while descending the stairs, it was breaking news about a dangerous criminal rampaging across the city.

"That’s a lousy way of putting it; anyone that knows of SHIELD could figure out they’ve just let one of their captives go," Happy mumbled unaware of the little girl’s presence. "And you'd think there is better security in there."

Morgan hopped down beside him on the couch with a bowl of ice cream before he could have switched channels.

"The reporter says it's a mass murderer from Rikers Island, not a SHIELD captive," she pointed out.

Happy quickly got over his dismay at her uninvited presence, and he sighed in resignation, knowing there was no beating around the bush with this girl.

"Because that's what they were told. SHIELD is a secret organisation, no one but the people in it can know about it, remember that."

"You and I aren't in it."

"But your family is, which means you are, and I work for you, so..." Happy shrugged.

"Okay."

Morgan wondered if the blurred figure on the distant camera shots was the one she had let loose. As things looked, it had only a short time left to enjoy the freshly gained freedom.

"They're closing in," she noted between two spoonfuls of the goods.

"Don't you worry, these guys know their deal. He'll be back in his cell in no time."

A new cell, that is, she corrected in her mind, but she remained silent. She wasn't a fool to sell herself out.

It was several hours later at night, on her way to the bathroom, that she noted the blinking light on a surveillance camera's screen, indicating an intruder in the garage, her favourite tinkering spot. She deemed it a personal matter, as it was now her personal space, so she climbed out through the window to check it on her own.

As she walked through the side door and turned on the dim ceiling light, her breath hitched in fright.

"G.C.M.T!"

The creature was as unscratched as it had left her company last time, but its hunched sitting posture showed exhaustion. Its forehead rested in a palm, and the other hand hung a sheet of white paper from the knee, with perfectly shaped handwriting on it:

_I'd like to offer you a deal. _

"A deal? Like what?" she asked on first thought.

The creature shrugged; which was peculiar, because by now, Morgan suspected that it was more clever than she had deemed it at first. Contrary to its rage fits inside the cell, it moved with delicate precision as it pulled out a white sheet from her drawing (a.k.a. wondervehicle-drafting) toolkit nearby. Morgan sought out a tall crate opposite the creature to sit on while it scribbled with a pencil. The next message was this:

_Don't sell me out. _

"I don't even know what you can offer in return," she said. "Do you have a spaceship?"

The G.C.M.T. shook its head, then completed the first note on the paper with the word _here_.

"Well... I want a pony," she mumbled, rummaging through her mental storage of desires. "And I want my Mom to come home. And my Daddy. Can you raise the dead?"

There was a muffled sigh, and the written word _Pony_ with a thumb up, which quickly broke down her momentary hopes.

"You get one night here for a pony," she decided. "That's the relative value of it."

The creature's lengthy headshake indicated the vehemence of his disagreement. A few seconds passed in motionless silence, then it jumped up and roamed around in the room, examining corners, shelves, objects.

"Hey, no digging into my stuff," Morgan warned, jumping off the crate. "It's a number one rule on Earth. Do you hear me?"

The creature apparently didn't. Morgan's physical objection was lightly repelled each time she assaulted the rummager. Nothing was taken, though; instead, a bunch of hidden cameras lay powdered in a corner within a few minutes.

Then a surprising transformation took place. The G.C.M.T. clawed at its face, thumbs pushing the leathery skin upwards, which then dissipated into minuscule sparks. A man’s head emerged with long dark hair, a lean face and a sigh of relief. From now on, it was a _he_, clad in skin-tight armour up to the jaw, and he didn't even have horns. While ten fingers combed his dishevelled hair backwards, he returned the girl's stare.

"Why were you a goat?" Morgan inquired.

The wave of his hand swept the unimportant matter aside, and then he held up an index finger, asking for her attention. Under her gaze, he pinned the sheet with his request on the wall for all-time notice. _Pony_ got a place below that. Another short thumbs-up sealed the deal peremptorily, and then the man shooed her towards the exit.

"You better have that pony ready as soon as possible, or I'll have to take serious measures," Morgan said, earning heavy nods of agreement in return. At the door, she found one more thing necessary to clarify. "Lucky you didn't need a kiss to turn into a man, because I'd never have kissed you."

His expression revealed he found the idea equally hateful.


End file.
